Under Grey Smoggy Skies: Living Homeless on the Streets of India’s Cities

Each night, around three million women, men and children sleep rough on harsh city streets across India.

People with no home, forced to brave the elements, extremes of climate, ferocious police brutality, and unremitting physical and sexual abuse, every day and night. Life is a desperate and ever-diminishing search for food and any work on any terms, and profound intrusions of privacy and rest. Surviving this chronically violent twilight world of unremitting indignity, want, abuse and crime, is a way of everyday life for them.

We—people who live in houses—share the cities with them and yet we know extraordinarily little about their lives, and care even less. Who indeed are these men and women who risk their lives sleeping on pavements and dividers on busy highways?

Under Grey and Smoggy Skies pieces together a mosaic of life and death on the streets, how homeless people survive—and sometimes succumb to—an overwhelmingly brutal, sometimes hellish environment.

The author

Harsh Mander is a peace and justice worker, writer, columnist, researcher and teacher.

A prolific writer, his 25 books include Between Memory and Forgetting: Massacre and the Modi Years in Gujarat; Burning Pyres, Mass Graves and a State that Failed It’s People: India’s Covid Tragedy; and Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India.

He writes a column Bearing Witness for the news portal scroll.in.

To counter rising hate violence and lynching, he leads the national initiative called the Karwan e Mohabbat or Caravan of Love, for atonement, solidarity, healing, conscience and justice.

Reviews

‘Harsh Mander issues a call to assert our humanity – to open our eyes and look at the homeless in Indian cities’ – Githa Hariharan, author and activist

‘Harsh Mander cares.  Consistently and unflinchingly, Mander’s writing reveals the underbelly of society and politics that we cannot afford to look away from’ – Natasha Badhwar

‘With quiet, powerful prose, Harsh Mander jolts the privileged residents of India’s cities into seeing what is hiding in plain sight.’ – Nares Fernandes, Editor, Scroll.in